Compression Analysis and Measurement of Active Receiving Antennas

Active antennas are of high interest for the emerging radar and telecommunication applications, including 5G and satellite megaconstellations. On the one hand, the non-linear analysis and measurement of active transmitting antennas are crucial, mainly due to the non-linear operation of the power amplifiers. Numerous papers addressing this topic can be found in the literature. On the other hand, to the authors' best knowledge, the non-linear analysis and measurement of active receiving antennas are scarcely reported in the literature. Likewise, they are of interest, specifically, to characterize such antennas under high-power unintentional or intentional spurious signals or to validate limiting circuit operations. Therefore, this paper is providing a theoretical analysis and measurement methodology to characterize the compression of active receiving antennas. For validation purpose, a demonstrator, operating at 2.45 GHz, was fabricated and measured using the proposed approach.